Multimodal Assignment: Meta-Narrative

Creating this academic blog was a very fun, interesting learning-experience. I am really glad I chose to analyze "300" in this medium. Another topic would not have been as ideally-suited to the digital environment, and a print medium would have been much too limited for "300." In contrast, the digital environment was perfect because this topic lent itself to using visual rhetoric. The images and videos really support and illustrate my analysis. In fact, they might prove my points better than my writing. There was also a lot of opportunity to use contextual hyperlinks, turning the blog into a great resource for someone who wanted to learn the historical and/or contemporary context of the movie. It would be a valuable resource even for someone who was interested only in Greek history. Inserting all the links was time-consuming but ultimately worth it.

I wish I had been able to make better use of audio clips. There were a couple places where audio would have been ideal, especially where I mention Leonidas shouting "Spartans! Prepare for Glory!" I tried to use embedded audio clips, but I found out that there were only two ways of doing so. The first was to contact the third-party website hosting the clips and get the html code. The second is to use a third-party service for creating and storing your own clips, such as Gabcast. I tried to use Gabcast, but it was very difficult to figure out and I finally gave up. I doubt that the audio-clip site I linked to in my second blog entry will be willing to release the html code for its clips, but I may try at a later date. For now, I am marginally satisfied with linking to the audio-clips. If one of my students chose this method of dealing with a technological impasse, I would be reasonably happy.

When I create a blog like this in the future, I will probably use a very similar process. I will write my text and then go back and insert the hyperlinks. I will do this more often as a I write, rather than entirely at the end. This will make it a little easier and less repetitive. I will also insert images and video to illustrate and support my main points or to simply provide context for my readers. Most likley, I will still do this at the end, after I have written my text. This way, I will know what kind of videos or images to look for. For audio-clips, I will try to find websites that provide html embedding code, just like YouTube does. If anyone knows of such a site, please let me know. In terms of the blog's overall rhetorical effect, I think it is important to choose topics that lend themselves to visual rhetoric and to effectively blend good visual rhetoric and good written rhetoric. I believe I pulled this off in this blog.